


White-Blinking Glow

by harpsichordist



Series: Beating Against the Darkness [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kylo Ren Being a Little Shit, Sexual Tension, The World's Angriest Lightsaber
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 11:29:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13739940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harpsichordist/pseuds/harpsichordist
Summary: She should feel that hope, too. It’s the kind that she had always clung to herself, shivering under her ratty blanket in the dark carcasses of Imperial starcraft, a pair of silhouettes on the backs of her eyelids.They’d come back for her, she had thought. She had believed.Now, when she closes her eyes at night, the two silhouettes merge into one, and she wants to believe something else entirely.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't just leave it hanging. This time, from Rey's point of view.

 

 

  
_Sympathy, if your light should go unseen_  
_And I'll be there to share_  
_If you don't mind the company_  

_All over your--_  
_Best your bet_  
_So far inside you now_  
_I am your silhouette_   

The Afghan Whigs, "Demon In Profile"

  

 

* * *

 

Rey sits cross-legged on the cot, brow knotted and a hand cradling her chin, inspecting the small wreckage of the lightsaber in her lap. The once mighty, ancient weapon, Luke’s weapon, now just the cracked shell that held its former glory. She knows she can fix the damn thing, knows it with all 19 years of her sun-fired, scavenger determination. She _has_ to.

These components are not like anything she’s seen before, and she’s seen a great many in her life – fancies herself a veritable encyclopedia of discarded, broken parts – but her eyes can trace how they fit together, a blueprint from which each function might be deduced. The battery, that’s it’s power source. If she can just repair the setting and the leads, thread them back through their housings into – into these – crystals? Then it’s just a matter of reconnecting the channel, routing it back to the ignition on the hilt, and that’s it, there you have it, that’s your ancient Jedi laser sword right there—

Rey feels a clunk against the base of the bed and jumps. A pair of antennae float just over the rim of the frame. She straightens to attention, and the familiar orange-and-white sphere rocks back and forth with excitement, starting to squeal.

“BB-8!” she calls, and stuffs the charred husk of the saber under her pillow, suddenly furtive with it for a reason she can’t explain. “Yes, I’m awake. I’ve been awake. _No_ , I’m not dressed—I can be in a minute—slow down, will you, I— we’ve found _what_?”

The droid falls abruptly silent, tilting backward, adjusting the focus of one gleaming red lens. Rey’s eyes drift to the smears of dried blood on the sheets, the dark spot on her shoulder of a re-opened wound. And memory flooding back: every sordid detail, under the dim-white glow of the _Falcon_ ’s standby lights. It wasn’t a dream. Mortified, and blushing hot, she throws a hand instinctively to her neck.

BB-8 unleashes a shrill, alarmist screed.

“It’s fine! I’m fine!” She’s not, not really, but makes a point of insisting otherwise, waving her arms defensively against the high-pitched barrage. “I’m not hurt, it’s just—I’ll explain later.  It’s not important. But a new Resistance base is.” BB-8 wobbles uncertainly as she swings her feet over the bed, but makes way for her to snatch her clothes, chirping while she yanks at a boot on one hopping foot, then the other.

Rey turns back to it as she palms the door open, taking care to grab a spare scrap of her old robes, a makeshift scarf, hastily rewrapping the cut on her shoulder with another. She swings her arms up, palms open, forcing all the nonchalance she can muster. “Happy beeps, yeah?”

The droid whirrs apprehensively, but rolls obediently past her legs, leading the way.

Only when it has disappeared down the corridor does she glimpse the shadow out of the corner of her eye, like a smear of ink at the edge of her field of vision, still in her room, _Han’s_ room, perched by the foot of the bed.

Ice cold dread shoots down her spine, and the naked instinct to flee, but she is paralyzed, the pressurized air in the room too heavy. As though gravity itself has compounded, crushing and pinning her in place. A wicked magnetism pulls at her insides, pulls her towards the center of the room, towards the bed.  

She doesn’t want to look.

_It’s him._

Bent crookedly at the waist, hand draped over his abdomen. Covering something. The dull shine of wet robes, soaked heavy, a widening pool at his knees, blood so dark it’s almost black. He’s injured, mortally, the stain rushing across the floor with terrifying speed, like a nightmarish tide around her ankles.

It comes out of her, a reflex, a full-throated, panicked scream: “ _Ben!_ ”

His head snaps up. In his eyes a draining, reddish light, his mouth twisted with agony. Or is it—loss? Betrayal?

Just as she regains her senses and the use of her legs, feeling the automatic impulse to bolt to him, in defiance of all terror, to kneel at his side and press herself against the wound, against _him_ , knowing it would be useless, knowing he would die there anyway, in her arms—

It’s gone. He’s gone. Shaken, Rey swallows the lump in her throat, crouching slowly to the floor and swiping a finger against the linoleum. She breathes a sigh when it comes away clean.

Whatever that was, whatever _he_ was, it wasn’t the Force bringing them together again, one last, demented congregation to witness his demise. She can feel him, distantly, if she closes her eyes and focuses hard, like gentlest tug on the other end of a string, binding them together. He’s alive. He’s alive.

She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes, wondering if she’s going crazy, if her own mind could conjure such a thing. Then she blinks away the afterimage, gathers her wits, and turns to bolt down the hallway. It brings her to a near-head on collision with Finn.

“Rey!” he exclaims, skidding to a halt just in time to prevent them knocking straight into each other, broad hands at her shoulders, steadying her. His face, kind and open, which she has always loved, and his eyes crinkling with worry. “Rey, what happened? We were all waiting for you. I thought I heard you—hey. Hey. You’re shaking.”

“Bad dream,” she tries, hoarsely. It’s not a lie, technically, but Finn raises his eyebrows, skeptical. He knows her too well.

“Must’ve been a hell of a dream.”

“Yeah.” She places her own palms up on his shoulders, drawing some comfort from the sight of him, then folding him into a familiar hug. She releases a weighted breath, closing her eyes. “Look, it’s just—it’s been hard, you know, since everything. Since we lost so much.”

“Since Crait. I know. Me too.” Rey recalls the scene of the aftermath, of their battered comrades clustered together in the _Falcon_ , Finn leaning gingerly, protectively over Rose. She thinks he’s stronger than she is, stronger than he knows. He pulls away to give her a reassuring smile, tilts her chin up with his finger.

“Happy beeps,” he says, sternly. Rey can’t help cracking a wide grin.

“I’m not sure Poe’s favored slogan applies here.”

“Of course it does! Totally universal. We’ll get it printed, you know, like one of those corny motivational posters. Get it plastered all over the interior of the _Falcon_. BB-8 will be thrilled.” He’s taking her hand, leading her toward the main hold, and Rey can feel some of the color returning to her face.

“Truly inspirational,” she declares the idea, laughing.

 

* * *

 

 Remote, temperate, and verdant green. That’s how General Organa had described it to their fractional, wounded company, hollow-eyed and exhausted but for the reflected glint of the holomap as they gazed at its faint, white-blinking glow. The coordinates of 1215017, a moon so unremarkable as to be known only by numerical designation, blinking like a pulse. It had been the barest flicker of an image, but they all held it rapt. They had known to see through the eyes of their general, who herself will always see the slight but persistent beating of hope against the darkness.

Where they’d be without Leia, Rey shudders to think.

They had been lucky to even receive the transmission. It’s a feat Rey is certain is attributable to BB-8 and its tireless scouring of the Outer Rim’s noise. Signals out here are muddled and degraded, easily lost among the cacophony of Inner Rim chatter that has drifted lightyears, coalescing like fields of debris. Rey had wondered how many messages drift here beyond their reach, stretching ever further into nothingness, into nowhere.

If Rey from Nowhere is to return to Nowhere, a distant moon seems a far better option to her than Jakku. According to the transmission’s source, anonymous but for a Resistance encryption key, it had been home to small estate and makeshift nature preserve, its value apparent only to a wealthy eccentric with a passion for game hunting (and, it seemed, a healthy dose of anti-First Order sentiment). In the wake of their victory on Crait, led by the return of a legend, he had decided it better suited to Resistance operations.

It’s only temporary, Leia had reassured them. Just until they could assess the damage, get their affairs in order. Formulate a plan to rebuild from the ground up. That’s what they are, now: the spark that lights the fire, or the roots from a seed that will take hold in the soil of 1215017, and then grow far beyond, all throughout the galaxy.

She should feel that hope, too. It’s the kind that she had always clung to herself, shivering under her ratty blanket in the dark carcasses of Imperial starcraft, a pair of silhouettes on the backs of her eyelids.

They’d come back for her, she had thought. She had _believed_.

Now, when she closes her eyes at night, the two silhouettes merge into one, and she wants to believe something else entirely.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Rey had been one of the first to disembark, into what seemed an ocean of trees, taller than she ever imagined trees could grow, stretching as far into the horizon as the eye could see. The air was colder than she expected, but sweet and humid and clean, a welcome respite from the stuffy chambers of the _Falcon_. They had all been growing a little stir-crazy, stacked on top of one another in cots, Poe and Finn doing their best to defuse the errant spats among cranky and crankier soldiers.

They had made quick work of the owner’s estate, which sat in the massive clearing where the transmission had directed them to land, the _Falcon_ itself kept close to the overhanging cover of the forest’s vast canopy. The outer gates of the property, already fortified with solid durasteel, had been lined meticulously with motion scanners; thermal shields constellated on the mansion roof to disguise their presence; master keylocks erased, re-coded, and provided with more deftly encrypted keys.

There’s room here, too, more room than Rey can conceive of any one family needing, though their remaining ranks seem abundantly grateful. It’s a little opulent for her tastes, maybe even tacky, but she’s sure she can’t be a good judge of that, anyway; not with where she comes from.

It’s a weight lifted from them all. 1215017, their anonymous little moon, barely charted and not even deserving of a proper name, may as well be paradise.

When it grows dark, nearly black without the reflected light of any neighboring moons, she hunches over the lightsaber in the uncomfortable expanse of her new quarters, working by the glow of a lamp. Once she’s welded the seams of the broken chassis back to a recognizable hilt, a simple enough task for any scavenger worth her salt, it’s time to repair the innards, soddering and piecing them together with daunting, methodical precision. She struggles and snarls and curses throughout, sucking on singed fingers, more than once resisting the urge to fling the stupid device at the perfectly ornamented Alumabronze wall.

When the dawn of the singular sun finally breaks the top of the trees, she connects the final lead to see the affirming blink of a blue indicator light, and has to stop herself from cheering and waking the entire household. She allows herself a victorious pump of her fist, instead, and grabs her rucksack to set out into the warming wilderness. She’s not testing it here.

After a few miles’ walk, delighting all the way in the sights and sounds of the teeming woods, she comes across a wide spot of purple-tinged grass, almost too picturesque to pass up. She retrieves the lightsaber from the bag, meandering to a patch of light that streams through a break in the tree tops, and stands beneath it.

Her neck cranes back, letting the sun warm her face. Breathing slow, sensing the balance of the Force all around her, as Luke had taught her. How it ebbs and flows within every blade of grass, the swaying of the trees in the gentle breeze, the songs of the birds among the branches, the footsteps of each animal as it wanders, the decaying of bones beneath the soil. All of it, all interconnected, and flowing through her.

She looks back down to the lightsaber in her hands, adjusting her grip and taking a final, deep breath, pushing past the trepidation creeping in her chest. Her heart pounds. She wants to cringe, but she doesn’t succumb to it. And she triggers the ignition.

The blade bursts forth sure enough, a bright sapphire blue even against the sunlight, and she almost cackles with joy before her heart sinks like a stone in a single, dramatic instant.

Something’s not right. Rey watches the plasma licking and frothing at its edges, disfigured, monstrous. She’s seen a weapon like this before.

“That’s awfully unstable,” comes the velvet voice behind her.

Rey gasps and swings the lightsaber in a wide arc as she turns, to see Ben Solo swerving back from its path. She can feel it now – the full depth of the pit in her stomach that she had tried to ignore – the sensation that the forest has been titled on some atomic axis, excised, set aside in space and time. Humming with an alien, transcendent frequency. She grits her teeth and forces her knees not to buckle, forces herself not to drop the spitting sword and run to him, throw her arms around his neck. She’s never been so relieved to see him. She’s not telling him that.

“You do that a lot,” he remarks, in that maddening, tuneless way. He keeps his arms at his sides, no indication he’ll reach for his saber. She swings the blade back around anyway, angle tipped at his neck.

“Where are you?” she demands, recovering her composure, and some obligatory posturing. Her eyes darting around her, across the green of the forest, no sign of the remaining Resistance fleet for miles. “Can you see where I am?”

“Please point that someplace else.” It’s more suggestion than threat. “I think we’ve established we can only see each other.”

It’s one way of putting it. She loosens the defensive stance, just enough. “You won’t try anything if I do?”

“I suppose you can never be sure,” he shrugs, casting his gaze to the side for a moment before brandishing it back at her, a formidable weapon of its own. “I’m not like you. Remember?”

It sends a pointed barb straight through to her heart. She’s guilty. She doesn’t need to be – nothing that happened that night, not an ounce of it was insincere, even if it should have been, should have been a ruthless, tactical extraction – but it’s there, anyway. It had cut him open, what she did, had tormented him, and she had wielded herself in a way that she imagined was unbecoming of a Jedi. What would the sacred texts have had to say about seducing the enemy?

She remembers how his voice had cracked, how he had pleaded with her not to go. Like she had a choice in the matter. Like every bone in her body hadn’t been willing her to stay.

She remembers how he touched her, and shivers. Lowers the lightsaber to examine its crackling fury in her hand. Then she powers it down.

“It’s not your handiwork,” he says, coming toward her, finally. Casually. She’s had the upper hand since she straddled him in the dark, an act that surprised even her, encouraged by and now fixed somewhere between the hyper-reality and un-reality that is their recurring interludes within the Force. But the cut of that imposing figure, shadowy against the green, noiseless boots on the underbrush like the paws of an animal, has her reconsidering her odds. She holds her breath when he angles himself just as the distance between them closes, like he intends to circle her. Still too far to touch, and too close for comfort.

“What do you mean?” she asks, though it comes out more like an accusation. She squares her body with him as he moves, never letting him at her back.

Ben gestures at the weapon. “Remarkable job, for a girl who’s never seen the guts of a lightsaber.”

“Is that your version of a compliment?” She scoffs, hands moving to her hips. “I believe that’s the closest you’ve come to offering one outright.”

“I can think of more compliments for you than there are stars in the galaxy.”

She stares at him, dumbfounded, cheeks prickling sudden and girlish. It’s stupid of her, but she hadn’t been expecting that one. Not from the man who had fallen upon her in battle and in the bedsheets with equal violence. It’s a little clumsy, and contrived, to be sure; and yet strangely poetic. Maybe even endearing, coming from the indomitable _Kylo Ren_.

She realizes, with a twinge in her chest, that for him these efforts at kindness are like facsimile; more of a concept, or an observation, to be recreated. Like he’s conjuring a distant memory, faded less by time than the brutality of having it beaten from consciousness.

He’s… _trying_.

How long has it been since he was afforded gentleness? How long since Snoke, invading every crevice of his mind, had shattered the foundations of Ben Solo, slowly refilling the cracks with black pitch? She had seen it for herself, those parts of him. Vulnerable, gnarled, and ugly. Parts he clearly hated. And she had felt his shame, the desperation with which he’d pushed her away. But the Force had crushed past the gates, unyielding in its course, incomprehensible, flooding them into one other, for better or worse.

He had seen her, too, the bits and pieces that she hid, sandblasted and scorched by a life in Jakku’s deserts. The loneliness. Despair that had more than once threatened to overtake her, that she would never admit, not to anyone.

Rey swallows hard. “Why are you doing this?”

“You keep saying that.” Ben pauses, grimacing as he looks away, his face twitching in a momentary knot of frustration. “Like I’m doing this to torment you. I can assure you these exchanges are no more pleasant for me than they are for you.”

To her dismay, the comment hurts a little. “Could have fooled me,” she grumbles.

His eyes flick back to hers, icily. In them she feels the weight of what they have done, and it dawns on her that she’s frightened, not so much of him but of herself, the gulf between what she wants to be and what she _wants._

“I like the new accessory,” he says coolly, after a long moment, like he smells it on her. The currents of illicit desire. The way he’s looking at her isn’t helping, and she debates the respective merits of punching him in the face, or running back to camp to stand under a cold shower, or crawling into a hole in the forest to die. Possibly all of the above, in succession.

“What?” she croaks instead.

He’s coming closer now. Her heart beats rapid like a bird’s. Slowly, carefully, as if any sudden movements might frighten her away, he extends a massive, gloved hand, and tugs gently down at the robe around her neck. There is the briefest brush of his fingers against her skin, and she swallows the helpless noise in her throat, the gush of relief that he is able to touch her, still.

 She watches his lips twist in a cruel mockery of a smile, his admiration of the marks where his mouth had branded her. He brings his eyes to hers, and as he does, wraps his hand around the back of her neck, floating the pad of his thumb over the bloom of a particularly darkened bruise.

Ben holds her gaze, and presses down. Just enough to make her whimper, but it’s more than pain that she feels. She recognizes it, that same burning before she clambered atop his lap and kissed him and clawed at him and held onto him for dear life. He inhales sharply, nostrils flared.

“But I think I like this one better,” he adds, his pupils blown and wild. “Oh. And what a task it must be, to keep it hidden from all those… inquiring eyes.”

“You should take off your shirt,” she snaps, “and turn your back to the First Order, so they can see your own fresh set of welts, and explain who put them there.”

He hums thoughtfully. “Funny. I distinctly remember you requesting the opposite, not too long ago. How far we’ve come.”

“Actually,” she retorts, before she can stop herself, “I don’t think I let you come.”

His eyes widen. She takes some shameless delight in catching him off guard, but he says nothing, only gives her that same, half-manic smile. His hand drops, leaving the cool of the air against her skin, and the sensation of something missing. She misses him close and towering over her as he walks away, to recoup some of the distance between them, maybe some of his composure. She knows now, confidently, that she can rattle him as much as he does her.

“It’s the crystal,” he says, finally.

“Oh, _now_ you change the subject,” she snipes, but he ignores it.

“The kyber crystal inside the saber is cracked. That kind of damage, it’s irreparable. You may as well be swinging around a stick of Detonite.”

Rey exhales gustily, folding her arms across her chest. “You just don’t want me using it.”

“True, but irrelevant.”

She scowls harder, turning away with a start like she’s threatening to storm off, but she makes it about a half rotation and an awkward jerk before twisting back, glaring at him, fists at her sides. Who is she kidding? She’s not going anywhere. The corner of Ben’s mouth is upturned just enough to register his peculiar brand of grim amusement. It drives her mad, and madder still that there’s no spine to her anger, any more than there was any true intent to stalk off and leave him there. She isn’t sure the Force would even let her.

He holds out his hand. His expression has faded again in an instant, back to the stoic, unreadable mask, mask behind yet another mask. The intensity of it is uncomfortable, and there’s a character to it that she hasn’t seen before.

“It will kill you,” he tells her, and suddenly his voice is sharp, dangerous.

Her eyes fall. He is asking for the lightsaber.

She regards it solemnly, then him. When nothing in her gut warns her away, she waits instead for a sign; the distant echo of Luke’s voice in her own head, even just a memory; a clear command to steer would be preferable, but she’ll take anything. The forest, and its whirlwind of life, has fallen paradoxically silent.

“Why?” Her voice is lower, softer now. It’s curiosity, not suspicion. And it’s not as though he can take it with him, from her – not here. ( _Can he?_ ) It doesn’t seem possible. And yet, hours ago, neither did touching the slick warmth of his skin from lightyears away. She banishes the thought, the feeling it stirs.

“Please,” he says, not quite like he had begged her in the night, broken and awed and undone, but it overtakes her nonetheless. She’s not sure what she’ll do if he says that word again, so she marches toward him, nearly shoves the thing into his hand, and backs away.

He turns it in his palm to test its weight: once, then twice. And he ignites it.

The lightsaber sputters to furiously to life, casting one side of his face in brilliant blue, the other in treacherous, angular shadow. Harsh, irregular jets of plasma course at its base, heating and warping the air around him, enough to distort his features as Rey strains to see them through the blaze. In a single fluid motion of his wrist, which would strike her for its beauty were there not terror coursing cold in her veins, he gives it a turn. The flourish before the blow.

But her fear is short-lived. He does not come for her, as he did in the forests of Takodana. He does not level at her the angry blade, nor does he assume his battle stance, hunching over it as a great, snarling demon. Instead, he lowers it to his side and holds it there while it crackles, its tip melting and blackening the patch of green above which it is angled. He remains there, motionless. Watching her.

Rey is baffled, frozen by the sight, more confused than scared with each passing moment, and each moment the blade seeming to grow brighter, hotter. As if lashing against the bounds of its own existence. Its blue cast, superheated, beginning to turn a white, pulsing glow.

“Ben!” she cries out, because his teeth are gritted, his face contorted in pain. The drone of the beam pitches higher, louder, into a deafening hiss.

Panicked, she lunges for him. That’s what does it. As her body pitches towards him, she sees his thumb catch the switch, the blinding white gone in an instant, reduced to a smoking hilt. Ben drops it to the grass as he falls to his knees, clutching the hand ravaged through his glove, soundless in his agony, stifling a howl that she can see rippling at the taut tendons of his throat.

She chokes his name again through a barely restrained sob, stumbling to the ground with him, her hands clasping around his shoulders, then his wrist, frantically, examining the wound. It gapes back at her, a terrible, festering red, threaded through with melted, black tendrils.

“ _What the fuck_ ,” she yells, shrill and angry through a stream of tears, “ _What the fuck were you thinking!_ _Ben!_ ”

He doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t look at her, just stays curled on the ground like a wounded gargoyle, so she grabs his face, pulls it up, forces him. “Ben,” she repeats, voice ragged, “I don’t understand.”

He collects himself after several straining breaths, and rasps, “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

“Fuck you,” she manages, through gritted teeth, the tears coming faster and harder now, like they did in the great red room, when he had broken her heart once before. He coughs a harsh, humorless laugh.

Rey lowers her forehead to his, and squeezes her eyes shut when she feels the warmth of him fading away. She can keep the image of him there, long after he is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this fic, please do yourself a favor and listen to the song quoted at the beginning of the story. Cheers!


End file.
